Monday, July 20, 2015

The First Brew at Bare Bones

Lyle Hari prepping for the brew

Last week something happened here that’s only occurred three times in the past 102 years. A local brewery made its first batch of beer. The inaugural brew on the new system at Bare Bones Brewery took place Thursday morning, July 16. The beer was brewed by Lyle Hari, brewmaster at Bare Bones.

The two previous first-brew batches made locally were by the Fox River Brewing Company in November 1995, and Peoples Brewing Company in the spring of 1913.

The first Bare Bones beer is a 15-barrel batch of American brown ale that will be served at the Bare Bones Taproom beginning in mid-August. Hari says, the brewery plans to have a release party for the beer after it becomes available.

The recipe for the beer is one that Hari has brewed before, most recently on a one-barrel system that’s now used for pilot batches at Bare Bones. The brew day went well. Hari said his brewhouse efficiency was about 1% from what he had anticipated. That’s exceptionally close to the target for an initial brew on a new system.

Hari plans to brew another beer this week. The second batch will be an American pale ale.

Around here, we’ve had a 20-year gap between brewery openings. I doubt we’ll have to wait that long again. Perhaps 102 years from now, people will look back on this as the point that marks the beginning of Oshkosh’s brewing revival.